Abstract

The goal of this project is to evaluate the different quality indicators that Airport Security Certifying Companies use at Barcelona-El Prat airport. To do so, I developed two different tools which aim to calculate the performance of X-Ray machine operators as well as making use of the information that is automatically recorded every time someone goes through the metal detectors at the airport security checkpoints. The first tool was developed to address two important problems that I found: an excessive amount of time (money) spent to calculate the performance of X-Ray machine operators and the real chances of a human error in the calculation process. In order to solve these two problems described above I decided to use Microsoft Excel's macros to automate the calculation of the performance of X-Ray machine operators. In this calculation method different variables such as type of filter, passengers or, employees were considered. The results of this automatization are highly beneficial from a management perspective: there's been a reduction of 99.5% in the time spent doing the calculation of this indicator. Before the automatization, it took 16 hours to make this calculation. However, thanks to this new tool the time needed was lowered to only 5 minutes. If we look at these figures in a year basis, numbers are even more impressive. Since this indicator is calculated 15 times a year, a total amount of 30 days of work was needed to make all the calculations, or which is the same, a whole month salary of an employee. With this new tool, the time needed has been reduced to only 75 minutes a year. This reduction by a 99.5% should also lead to huge savings in labour costs. Last but not least, the way the tool was programmed has eliminated any chance of an eventual human error. Airia Ingeniería y Servicios S.A., the company auditing the security of Barcelona-El Prat airport has been using this tool since last April. I spent most of the time of this project developing the second tool, which aims to analyze the passengers flow at the metal detectors (security checkpoints). This application was programmed as well with Microsoft Excel's macros. The application shows the average flow of passengers per hour and per day comparing it with a theoretical capacity of the filters that are currently used. Moreover, the tool also analyzes in a daily basis the performance of the filters during peak hours. This tool could be extremely useful to the airport's operators as well as to the company developing these filters. To use this application it is necessary to generate a specific Ceia NetID report with certain information which both airport operators and the security company have access to. The memory has been written in LaTeX.